The structure of the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised: Global distress, Somatization, Hostility, and Phobic Anxiety scales are reliable and robust across community and clinical samples from four European countries

Abstract

While the reliability of SCL-90-R subscales is often questioned, five relatively recent European studies have examined the factor structure of SCL-90-R using a bifactor model and concluded that most of these subscales are reliable. However, examination of their results shows that three subscales, Somatization, Hostility, and Phobic Anxiety, consistently had significantly higher reliability than the other six across clinical and community samples recruited in three very different European countries, Greece, Hungary, and the Netherlands. The objective of this study was to examine whether this "top-3″ would be found in a sample from a fourth European country, France. To do this, we had 696 university students (387 women, 56 %) complete the SCL-90-R and we examined the reliability of the scales of this questionnaire by testing a bifactor model using Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEM). Our results confirmed that, in our sample, the three scales presented a higher reliability than the other six scales. It therefore seems that there exists, at least in the European cultural area, a stable structure of the SCL-90-R comprising a global distress factor and three reliable and robust specific factors: Somatization, Hostility, and Phobic Anxiety.

Keywords: Bifactor model; Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEM); Reliability criteria; Subscales.